About Dancer

Meet Dancer users - Hofmeir Media

Jörg Kost of Hofmeir Media GmbH, a German hosting and colocation provider,
kindly agreed to take part in a mini-interview on how Dancer has helped play a
part in their success.

I asked Jörg a few quick questions:

What drew you to Dancer originally?

My plan was to link our customer relationship tool to our configuration
management database, so that our colocation and datacenter customers can
directly view and manage their contracts. While the CRM is a GUI-driven
third-party-application, our CMDB is some bunch of old perl cgi.pm-scripts that
even holds code written by myself over a decade ago. Keeping my eyes around for
a bitter-sweet-solution to program a new customer portal, I had evaluated the
regular environments like Rails and the perl-based frameworks Mojo & Catalyst.

I wanted to keep the real programming process as tiny as possible and re-use old
and wise database queries and code. So it was natural to choose a perl-based
solution again. I found Dancer in overtime in my evaluation process after I had
searched "micro framework perl" on Google. Sometimes you will find the missing
puzzle pieces very late in the game.

What benefits has Dancer brought to Hofmeir Media?

Being a hardcore cgi.pm user before, it saves me a lot of time writing
already-invented code. The session and authentication handling works great for
us. Also giving me the full debug output in development mode makes tracing
errors more convenient than the usual FatalsToBrowser. Being PSGI-able means, we
can add more functionality like XSFR-protection anytime. Years ago I wrote my
own template-functions and used the ClearSilver-package, now I have several
working choices integrated.

What would you like to see changed?

Honestly, I always fail in setting up the YAML config file in the correct
tabbing, but this could be my own personal disorder and not dancer-specific
;-).

(Dave: this is one of the reasons Dancer2 will support various config file
formats!)

How many people are responsible for development at Hofmeir? How many of those work on code using Dancer?

We are three guys doing things. I am something like the core maintainer and
programmer for the functions, because I do have the most depth-in knowledge of
all the internal databases and processes that keep things rolling. However I
am not touching any layout- or ajax-driven things myself.

You mentioned your customer portal / service portal is powered by Dancer - how did Dancer help you in building it? What made it "the tool for the job"?

It makes me focus on my main problems. If I want to introduce something new, I
do not need to think about setting up routines for templates, parameter or
routing. I basically start writing functions outside of dancer and at some time
just import them, returning some hashes into the route handler and boom - we are
ready to go primetime.

How many customers use your Dancer-powered control panel?

We do have about 200 customers that access our colocation portal. And here is a
hint for next years interview: We are also developing a new customer interface
for our webhosting branch. This will give around five-digit customers a new
dancer-driven interface.

What can customers do using this control panel / portal?

With our colocation panel our customers are able to do all major things that
you expect when you rent into a site. You can check your used traffic volume
and you can screen the bandwidth. And even more important these times: You can
also check the power usage of every connected device.

Then you have the general things like setting up DNS, opening up trouble
tickets and download technical support information. And with our newest
release you will be able to fire up ready-to-go cloud servers and load
balancing clusters. Can it be any better? ;-)

So, thanks to Jörg Kost and all at Hofmeir Media GmbH.

Do you use Dancer? Want to share your story?

If you're interested in taking part in a simple interview in how Dancer has
helped you for a future advent calendar post, it's not too late, there are still
slots left - just drop me a mail - davidp@preshweb.co.uk